The Cupcake Diaries Collection: Katie and the Cupcake Cure; Mia in the Mix; Emma on Thin Icing; Alexis and the Perfect Recipe (18 page)

After homeroom, my first class of the day is math, which is always painful even on non-Mondays. Bella and Callie are in that class too, so I waved when I came in and sat down.

Mrs. Moore hadn’t arrived yet, so I took out my sketchbook and began to draw. I had been trying to come up with a sweater/skirt combo like the ones I’d seen in the magazine.

Callie sits behind me, and I noticed her looking over my shoulder. “That’s really cute,” she said. “I wish I could draw like that.”

“You probably can,” I told her. “I wasn’t very good until I took lessons. Then I learned some ways to do things that I never thought of before.”

“Can you show me sometime?” Callie asked.

I was about to answer her, but the bell rang just then. So I waited until after class. Callie and I both have science together second period, so I walked with her down the hallway.

“So Callie, if you want to draw together sometime, just let me know,” I said.

“That would be nice,” Callie replied. “I should give you my cell phone number. Come see me before you get on the bus and we can exchange, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

That’s when I noticed Katie walking toward us. Her class was in the opposite direction.

“Hey!” I said with a wave. Katie waved but had a puzzled look on her face. I didn’t understand why until I saw her later at lunch.

“So, what were you and Callie talking about?” Katie asked.

I thought it was kind of a strange question to ask. I mean, I can talk to whomever I want, can’t I? For a moment I felt like I was being quizzed by the friendship police.

Then I remembered that Katie and Callie used to be
best
friends. So maybe Katie was just interested.

“Callie liked a drawing I did,” I said. I left out the part about us maybe getting together. “I was sketching a sweater and a skirt.”

Alexis rolled her eyes. “Is that all those PGC girls think about? Fashion and makeup?” she asked. “What about all of the problems in the world? Don’t they know that the rain forest disappears bit by bit every day? And what about all those polar bears up north? All their ice is melting and they have nowhere to live! Doesn’t the PGC care about that?”

Emma shook her head. “Alexis, you worry too much.”

“You can’t be serious
all
the time,” I pointed out. “Besides, those PGC girls aren’t all that bad.”

“That’s your opinion,” Alexis said. “When I see them do something to help the polar bears, then maybe I’ll change my mind.”

Katie looked really worried and unhappy. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe she was worried about the polar bears too. But I had a feeling that something else was bothering her—me.

T
he rest of the week was pretty normal, except that I spent every night cleaning the kitchen to get ready for the Cupcake Club meeting on Friday. Mostly it was Dan’s mess. He is addicted to tortilla chips and cheese sauce, and so there are always piles of dried-up orange cheese all over the counters and the table. But if you try to talk to him about it, it goes like this:

Me: “Dan, can you please clean up that cheese all over the counter?”

Dan: “You mean that little orange dot?” (He takes a paper towel and moves it once over the cheese.) “Done.”

But, of course, the cheese is still there.

I also had to figure out how to do the yellow and
green flowers for the top of each cupcake. I spent some time looking online. There are a lot of cool sites that sell cupcake and baking supplies.

Finally I found a site that sold these beautiful yellow flowers made out of sparkly sugar. Each flower had two little green leaves sticking out of it. They were so pretty! I showed them to Mom, and she ordered four dozen of them for me. She said we could pay her back after Ms. Biddle paid us.

Mom had a meeting in the city on Friday, and Dan had a basketball game, so Eddie got pizza for the two of us. I put Tiki and Milkshake up in my room because they go nuts when a lot of people come to the house.

Katie, Alexis, and Emma all showed up at seven. Emma’s mom was standing behind them.

“I’ll be back later to pick everyone up,” she said. “What time do you think you’ll be done?”

Katie spoke up. “If we can bake all four dozen at once, we’ll probably be finished by nine,” she said.

“Sounds good,” Mrs. Taylor said. “I’ll see you girls later.”

Everyone came inside, and Eddie walked up with a big smile on his face.

“So, what kind of cupcakes are we making tonight?” he asked.

“
We
are making lemon cupcakes with cream cheese icing,” I told him.

Eddie made a goofy frown. “Aw, don’t I get to help?”

“You can be the official oven-turner-onner,” Katie suggested.

“I can do that,” Eddie said. “I’m an expert at that.”

“We’ll call you when we need you,” I said. Then I nodded to my friends. “Follow me.”

“Your stepdad is really funny,” Emma remarked once we got inside the kitchen.

“
Almost
stepdad,” I corrected her. “And you wouldn’t say that if you spent more time with him. Most of his jokes are awful.”

“Yeah, my dad thinks he’s much funnier than he really is too,” Emma said. “But I’d rather have that than some grumpy old dad.”

Hmm, Emma had a point. I’d take Eddie’s humor over Alina’s anger issues any day!

Katie put the shopping bag she was carrying on the kitchen table, and Alexis took out her notebook.

“If we divide the tasks, we can get things done faster,” she said. “Katie, since you’re the best baker you can start mixing together the cupcake batter.
I’ll squeeze the lemons for you. Emma, you can make the frosting. And Mia, you can work on the decorations for the cupcakes.”

“It’s going to be easy this time,” I told her. I picked up the package of sugar flowers on the counter. “We just need to stick one on each cupcake, see?”

“Ooh, they’re so pretty!” Emma said.

“Ms. Biddle’s going to love them,” Katie added.

“Okay, good,” Alexis said. “Then Mia, you can help Katie with the batter. That should cover everything.”

“Not everything,” I said. I unclipped my iPod from the waistband of my skirt and plugged it into the player on the kitchen table. “We need some music.”

I always work better with music in the background (unless it’s Dan’s heavy metal music), and pretty soon we were dancing around the kitchen as we worked. Katie and I measured out the flour, baking powder, and salt, and sifted them together. Then we melted some butter and put that in a bowl. We added some eggs, sugar, and vanilla. Alexis gave us a measuring cup with fresh lemon juice inside, and we dumped that into the rest of the wet ingredients. After we mixed those together, we slowly started adding the flour mixture. After doing two
hundred cupcakes for the fund-raiser, we knew the steps pretty much by heart.

“Eddie! It’s time to turn on the oven!” I called out.

Eddie came running into the kitchen like a football player running onto the field from the sidelines. “Okay, what temperature do we need?” he asked.

“Three hundred and fifty, please,” Katie told him.

While the oven was heating up, we used an ice cream scoop to plop some batter into the lined cupcake pans. Katie had picked out yellow cupcake liners to match the flower on top. The batter was a pretty yellow color too.

“These are going to look so nice,” Emma said as we slipped them into the oven.

I nodded. “Wait until we put the flowers and icing on top.”

We set the timer for twenty minutes. That’s one of the great things about cupcakes—they don’t take long to cook. While the cupcakes baked, I washed the bowls we’d just used, and Katie dried them. Alexis took a spoon and took a taste of Emma’s cream cheese frosting.

“Mmm, that is sooo good,” she said. “It’s going to go great with the lemon.”

The timer buzzed, and Eddie came running into the kitchen.

“Better leave this to me, ladies,” he said. “Hot stuff coming out!”

I rolled my eyes at Katie, and she smiled back. I knew she could appreciate how corny Eddie can be—she always says how corny her mom can be too.

Eddie removed the pans from the oven, and we showed him how to carefully tip over the pans onto the cooling racks. The cupcakes looked golden yellow and perfect, and they smelled super lemony.

We sat and talked while the cupcakes cooled off. Then I heard the front door bang shut. Dan was back.

“What’s that smell?” he asked, walking into the kitchen. He was wearing his red and white basketball uniform, and he was pretty sweaty.

“Please do not get sweat on the cupcakes,” I told him, and I heard Emma giggle behind me.

Dan ignored me. “I am so hungry. Mind if I take one?”

But he didn’t wait for an answer. He just picked one up, broke it in half, and stuffed it in his mouth.

“Dan!” I shrieked. “Those are for a baby shower tomorrow. We’re being
paid
to make those!”

Katie, Alexis, and Emma all looked as horrified as I felt.

“Maybe it’s not so bad,” Emma said. “We’re only one short.”

Then Dan made a face. “Whoa, what kind of cupcakes are these? They’re supersour!”

“They’re lemon cupcakes,” Katie said. “They should taste like lemon, but also be sweet.”

Dan handed the uneaten half of his cupcake back to me. “I don’t know. It doesn’t taste sweet to me.”

“You just don’t know a good cupcake when you taste one,” I said. I broke off a piece and popped it into my mouth. The sour taste of lemon stung my tongue.

“Uh-oh,” Katie said. “Is he right?”

I nodded. “It’s really sour. Not sweet at all.”

I handed each girl a piece of cupcake. Each one made a face as she tasted it.

“So, how much lemon did you put in these anyway?” Dan asked.

“I measured it myself,” Alexis replied. “One and a half cups, just like the recipe said.”

Katie frowned. “One and a half cups? I thought the recipe said one half cup.”

“I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure it was one and a half cups,” Alexis said, but her voice didn’t sound so sure.

Katie looked in the recipe book. “Nope. It says
right here, one half cup of lemon juice. That’s probably what happened.”

Alexis’s face turned bright red. “Oh, no! I’m so sorry!”

I felt bad for her. “I should have checked when you handed me the measuring cup,” I said. “It’s my fault too.”

“Looks like you guys need to make some more cupcakes,” Dan said.

I looked at the clock. It was already after eight o’clock.

“I’ll do it,” Alexis said. “I’ll stay up all night if I have to, but I’ll finish them.”

“Of course you won’t,” Emma said. “We’re all in this together.”

Katie grinned. “Don’t sweat it, Alexis. You’ve got so many numbers in your brain, you were bound to get them mixed up sometime.”

Alexis shook her head. “I still can’t believe it. I thought I checked it, like, three times.”

“You know, you guys should
thank
me for eating that cupcake,” Dan told them. “Otherwise, whoever’s paying you would have been pretty disappointed.”

I hated to admit it, but Dan was right.

“You can be our official cupcake taster,” Katie said.

“I don’t know,” Dan said. “It could be dangerous.”

Everybody laughed. Even though we had to start from scratch, it wasn’t terrible, because we were all in it together, just like Emma said.

And that, unlike our cupcakes, was pretty sweet.

I
t was a night that would go down in cupcake history. First Katie, Alexis, and Emma had to call home to make sure they could stay late. Then we had to get to work on making the cupcakes from scratch again.

This time, we all watched closely as Katie measured each ingredient. After Alexis squeezed more lemons, she took the measuring cup to each of us to check it. It was exactly one half cup.

“Alexis, your flair for perfection has returned,” Katie kidded her.

We filled the cupcake tins, stretching out the batter just a little bit so that we had two extra cupcakes with which we could do a taste test. Mom walked in just as we were putting the second batch in the
oven. Even though she looked a little tired, she still looked fabulous. She wore a ruffled ivory shirt with sleek trousers, a gold necklace and bangle bracelets, and, of course, her favorite black high heels.